Melissa A > Recent Status Updates

More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots.

“Really, though. Didn’t you ever fly in your dreams?” Even I had done that, though not often.
“Only when I was real close to flying in real life,” he said. “Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.”
“So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can’t think of anything to dream about except our ordinary lives.”

Maybe our headlights just, for some reason, shine a little to the other side. Our signals sometimes just get a little crossed. ~ Maybe they’re shining back, in the only way they can.

Even in a lethargic mood she noticed every vanilla orchid, every agony and ecstasy. Especially agony. She might as well not have had skin, where emotions were concerned. Other people’s hurt ran right over into her flesh.

She’s imagining it, biting down. The spray of hot salt down her throat, teeth sinking into soft flesh. Taking a part of me into her, keeping it for herself. I can feel her, see her, thinking it. Experience it myself, through her. And I think, this is it.

Imagine letting someone consume you- literally…

“It liked me feeling everything I felt—fear, pain, relief in the punishment, almost, and it liked me … eating. It happened eight times. The thing leading me there, watching me eat the body. On the sixth body, I broke my tooth on a femur. Had to go get a fake one.”

“Human dwellings, places to sleep, places to pay bills and watch television and exercise and cook and eat and fuck and bathe and read and dream and want and fear and scroll on our phones and hold loved ones and sit alone in the blue glow of a screen and clean and dirty and clean and dirty until we don’t anymore. Until we die, like everyone else. Like we always knew we would.”

“As we check for the locations of exits in our movie theaters and put in metal detectors at schools, as we glance up to the mountains for the weather, for the time of day. As we shore up our houses against disproportionately high levels of radon poisoning in the soil, try and keep it from seeping through the cracks into our lives to poison us”

“All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven’t. Most don’t mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn’t happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.
But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she’ll know.”

Genuinely one of the easiest reads, this book is full of wonder. Every chapter is packed full of the most breath taking environments. I describe this book as pure delight.

When Keishin asked her why she liked painting reflections, she told him that it was because the most desirable things were the ones that you could see, but never touch. Keishin crouched by the small moon floating in the puddle and wondered if it longed for the sky.

“You could be made of stars the way you outshine everyone around you, including myself. I am simply happy to be bathed in the light.”

“What is life if you cannot find something you love, and let it kill you?”

FINALLY this bitch feels some emotions! Took the whole book for her to cry.